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In December 2005, NBC News revealed that the Department of
Defense (DoD) was gathering information on peaceful anti-war
activity and storing it in a database known as TALON, Threat and Local
Observation Notices. Campus protests and counter-recruiting efforts
of such groups as Code Pink, Brooklyn Parents for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War and American Friends Service Committee won
the DoD's attention as organizers of suspicious, possibly terrorist, activities near military installations. TALON's aim, according to the DoD,
was "to alert commanders and staff of potential terrorist activity or
apprise them of other force protection issues."

To learn more about "this disturbing echo of an earlier era of
unchecked and illegal government surveillance," the ACLU filed Freedom of Information Act requests in February 2006 to viewTALON
reports. Yet it took a court order for the Pentagon to release any documents. The civil liberties group discovered that the Pentagon threat
database stored not four dozen but at least 185 entries on lawful, antiwar political activities in fourteen states, reports which the Pentagon
says are now deleted.

The most fascinating element of this report are the pages of reproductions of the released documents. Over and over you read information
from activist email blasts or web site postings translated into bureaucrat-ese by a "Special agent of the federal protective service, Dept. of
Homeland Security." A Department of Defense memo about TALON
from February 2006 said most contributors of information on the lawful anti-war protests were from "civilian" (non-military) sources and
that it was unsolicited.

It is clear from the memo that local and state police were tied into
the information gathering system and at least one TALON report stimulated the San Francisco Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force in November 2004 to advise commanders of military "processing stations" on
how to handle upcoming counter-recruiting demonstrations. [Joint
Anti-Terrorism Task Forces coordinate activities among all forms of
intelligence and law enforcement in a region.]

Another TALON report quotes an FBI Intelligence analyst about
the practices of International Action Center activists, revealing that
the FBI is doing its own scrutiny of anti-war groups (p. 41). Similarly
a report on a UC Santa Cruz protest against recruiters at a career fair
refers to government surveillance of domestic political groups: "Source,
a federal law enforcement officer with 20 years of experience in intelligence collection on domestic groups stated that civil disobedience
can range from a sit-in to forcibly removing personnel from the station along with vandalism of the building(s)." (p. 42)

The DoD admitted in the February 2006 memo that the mission
of apprising the government of not only terrorist threats but also "other
force protection issues" generated "some confusion" and encouraged
the reporting on anti-war groups. But it also noted that "This sharing of information has resulted in an enhanced relationship between
DoD and local, state and federal law enforcement agencies."

In calling for Congressional hearings, the ACLU warned that we
still don't know if there are any other databases, nor have we seen the
directives guiding the TALON program or any other troublesome content.

One piece of good news coming out of the documents is that the
government thinks counter recruitment is having an effect. As one report
noted, "Counter Recruitment has become a national issue, and it's working. Between these efforts and widespread anger about the war, all
branches of the United States military have seen drastic drops in their
recruitment rates." (p. 34)

-- Abby Scher

Other Reports in Review

In Katrina's Wake

This is a moving indictment of the bald
opportunism of conservatives who privatized
the public schools in New Orleans after Katrina. Within nine days of the hurricane – and
the destruction of over half of the city's schools
- the Heritage Foundation had issued a
market-based, privatizing vision for rebuilding of New Orleans that might have been a
blueprint for what came afterward.

As the report documents, federal Secretary
of Education Margaret Spellings repeatedly
intervened to support Heritage's vision by
waiving regulations and facilitating the transfer of millions of public dollars to establish privately
run - but publicly funded - charter
schools.

Around the country, government funded
charters, which can be privately or publicly
run, have been used to break teachers unions,
siphon funds from already-strapped public
schools, and offer corporations the chance to
profit from public dollars.

Woven through the report's narrative is a
morality tale in the shape of a news story that
describes the conservative takeover of the
school system. We read how a "network of conservative anti-government activists have moved
with singular intensity" to replace public education with charter schools that function like
a sieve, rescuing white and middle class children and letting poor, underachieving and special needs students of color, who made up 93%
of the city's public school population, fall
through the gaps.

In January 2006, only 17 public schools
were open, 14 of them charters. By September 2006, only 53 schools were open, still
fewer than half the pre-storm number, 31 of
them charters with 21 different organizations
running them.

Even after Katrina's devastation of the
educational system, students and former students in a community-based writing program run by the Center continued to write,
and their eloquent stories form half of this
publication.

-– Pam Chamberlain

The Klan's New Target

The Ku Klux Klan has been revitalized by
the anti-immigrant fervor sweeping far right
groups, attracting more members and fueling
greater activity, according to this report by the
Anti-Defamation League. The Klan's particular ideology claims that Jews are coordinating a tide of non-White immigrants to flood
the nation with the aim of challenging and ultimately destroying white supremacy in the
United States.

Members loosely coordinated in 40 different Klan groups occasionally come together
in "klonvocations" - not just in the South,
but also the Midwest, mid-Atlantic and Western states. One newly founded sect in Florida,
the Empire Knights of the KKK, now has
chapters in 18 states. Groups have grown
where immigrants have become relatively
large proportions of the local population
fairly quickly as they fill jobs like those in food
processing plants of the Midwest.

The researchers track "unity rallies" bringing together the Klan with other anti-Semitic
and racist groups like Christian Identity, neo-
Nazis, and the Aryan Nation. Relying on
publicity actions and public gatherings, Klan
members have also been implicated in hate
crimes, illegal gun running, plots to blow up
government buildings, and other criminal
activity, including violence directed against disputing factions. For all this detail, carefully
documented and happily without hyperbole,
the report still focuses on a network whose current membership it estimates at about 5,000
nationally.

-- Pam Chamberlain

Swinging Voters

This is a sound election analysis that takes
an important kernel of truth - the influence
of libertarian-minded people as swing voters
in the 2006 elections - and uses it to inflate
the importance of the authors' own political
position.

The Cato Institute is the libertarian think
tank that promotes a free market ideology in
which the government's role is dramatically
limited to protecting property and persons.
"Libertarian" is also the word used to describe
those across the political spectrum – including Cato Institute researchers - who support
civil liberties. The authors studied the voting
patterns of yet another definition of "libertarian" - those who are socially liberal and
"fiscally conservative," though not necessarily supporters of the free-market ideology
such as Cato promotes.

These fiscally conservative libertarians
could be 10 to 20 percent of the electorate, the
authors suggest - more than soccer moms
or NASCAR dads, other attractive, independent minded voters. They swung to the
Democrats in 2004 and 2006, according to
their analysis of multiple polls. Still, the
authors argue, journalists overlook the strength
of libertarian fiscal conservatives because of
their rigid prism dividing the electorate into
a right and a left.

The authors admit these voters don't actually identify themselves as libertarians, and it
is difficult to compare polls which ask different questions. A close look at the questions also
finds they often exaggerate the intensity of
someone's anti-government opinion, for
instance by forcing the person to choose
whether s/he thinks: "the less government the
better" or "there are more things that government should be doing."

With those caveats: Seventy four percent
of these voters went for Bush, Sr. in 1988,
according to one poll. In 2004, only 59 percent voted for Bush, Jr., while they doubled
their vote for the Democrat, narrowing the gap
between Republican and Democratic votes
cast from 52 points in 2000 to 21 points in
2004. By 2006, that margin was 23 points.
Last year, fifty-nine percent of fiscally conservative libertarians voted for Republicans.

The authors account for this erosion by a
growing distaste for Bush, Jr.'s spendthrift,
wiretapping ways. The Public Eye's coverage of
right-left coalitions against the Patriot Act
(Spring 2006) supports this analysis. Yet voters tending toward fiscal conservatism do not
necessarily embrace Cato-style libertarianism, which often gets lost in the authors'
repeated description of these voters as "libertarian" in a perhaps unconscious writerly
sleight of hand.